Labor Day weekend toll in Chicago: 9 slain, 46 wounded

A man groaned while paramedics tended to him under the bright lights of a Shell gas station at Garfield Boulevard and Halsted Street in Englewood Tuesday morning.

Officers had told dispatchers minutes earlier that the man was not able to communicate and couldn’t give a description of the gunman who shot him and three other people.

“Any (description) from the guy at 55, can he even talk, 55 and Green?” the dispatcher asked.

“Negative … he’s making little noises.”

“That’s a negative, he can’t talk,” the dispatcher told officers across the radio zone.

A man who had been tending to the victim stood up after paramedics began to transfer him from the concrete to a stretcher. He walked past a fire engine, which parked next to the gas pumps before the ambulance arrived.

He circled around the stretcher and walked back toward the gas station, where a man in a Sox cap and “Straight Outta Chicago” T-shirt stood outside the door.

“Damn, he OK?” asked the man in the Sox cap.

“I hope he gon’ be.”

“Where he shot at?”

“He shot here,” the man said, pointing to the shoulder above his heart. “He come out this field right here.”

“Dang.”

The victim and three others were on a back porch a block south when someone started shooting at them.

When the paramedics lifted him onto the stretcher, he stopped groaning and his body went limp. His arm dangled over the side of the stretcher. He was taken to Stroger Hospital, in critical condition.

The four shot there — two left in critical condition — brought the toll from gun violence in Chicago to 8 dead and 46 wounded since Friday afternoon. Another person was stabbed to death Monday morning. In 2014, 42 people were shot over Labor Day weekend, five of them fatally, and three other people were killed, while in 2013, 40 people were shot, nine of them fatally, according to Tribune data.

Nineteen of those shot this past weekend were wounded between Friday afternoon and early Saturday morning, the most violent stretch of the Labor Day weekend. Three people were shot to death and another nine wounded Saturday night and Sunday morning. Shootings from Sunday afternoon into Monday morning left six people wounded. Between late Monday morning and early Tuesday, another 17 people were shot — two fatally — and a man was stabbed to death.

The shootings happened in all parts of the city but primarily on the South and West sides. The northernmost shooting happened on Howard Street in Rogers Park, across the street from Evanston. The southernmost happened in the Golden Gate neighborhood, blocks from the suburb of Riverdale.

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